Customer Profile
O'Sullivan Creel was born out of a 2001 merger between two of Northwest Florida's most prominent accounting firms. Today they are one of the largest regional certified public accounting firms in their state with three locations across Northwest Florida. They are a full-service accounting and consulting firm, offering services such as audit and accounting, business consulting, employee benefits consulting & plan administration, information technology, tax planning & preparation, and wealth advisory services.
In 2003, O'Sullivan Creel completed a momentous transition to a paperless office - no small feat for a company that offers such a wide variety of services, all of which involve mountains of paper and documentation. This forward-thinking idea embraces information technology and involves all documentation including worksheets, financial statements, tax returns, email and faxes being stored digitally. The move was meant to provide both clients and staff with instant access to critical information.
The Challenge
O'Sullivan Creel had been using a paper-based evaluation process for several years. No stranger to paperwork, employees and managers alike dreaded the task so much so that the entire process was shrouded in a black cloud. As an employee-focused company they could easily recognize the need to invest time in employee development, but the mechanics of getting it done, using numerous spreadsheets, were simply excruciating. The completed appraisals were printed and manually stored. A move to a paperless employee performance management system seemed a natural progression.
More importantly, there was no simple way to record who had or had not yet completed their performance appraisals. As a result, not much happened in between goal setting and year-end reviews, when the results had to be manually tabulated and reviewed in preparation for annual salary adjustments.
The Solution
After the decision was made to graduate from a paper-based process, firm partner Kathy Anthony, PHR, championed the cause. Prior to hearing about Halogen Software, Anthony had not been aware that a web-based process existed. After several months of due diligence, they had narrowed their choices down to two products.
Ultimately, Halogen Software was chosen for its products' user-friendliness. Anthony and her team recognized that the chosen product had to be easy to use, or they would be met with resistance from the rest of the organization.
Their main goal was to make the web-based appraisals look as much like the paper versions as possible, something which was entirely simple to do. "We also were impressed with the willingness of the Halogen team to work with us to meet our needs," says Anthony. "If we have something unique that we would like customized, they research it, let me know if it is scheduled for a future upgrade and if it's not, they give me a reasonable quote of what it would cost for them to build it into the system for our firm".
For added convenience, Anthony also opted to have the product hosted on Halogen's hosting environment, which she refers to as "absolutely seamless", as any changes that need to be made can be completed very quickly and easily.
Because of the distance, Anthony opted for training via web-conference, one of Halogen's many flexible training options. It worked very well and their implementation was painless. Training for employees never occurred because they found it to be unnecessary - she rolled the application out to the management team and before she had the opportunity to schedule training for the team members, they had already gone in and mastered the system, completing their evaluations without any formal training.
For Anthony, the products' best feature is the real-time reporting, which provides her with instant information at any given point in time. She can easily see where each team member stands in the process, and employees can be sorted by division, office, skill level, etc. for easy comparison.
"The development plans have also been a tremendous help to us in building our training curriculum," adds Anthony. "We take the development plans and build out training plans to meet the goals of our team members. Before Halogen, we never had any formal development plans and we see tremendous value to having them in place".
The Benefits
Response to the Halogen eAppraisal system has been overwhelmingly positive. As a paperless firm, their culture already embraced and appreciated the value of electronic processes. Additionally, the system is viewed as very effective and efficient way of accomplishing an important task. Once again, they have successfully moved away from paper and spreadsheets to focus more on employees - this time to establish goals and customize development plans.
Every person had an on-time appraisal for the first-time in the history of the firm. Every person has goals that mean something. Everyone has a personal developmen plan.
The firm has goals for growth, marketing development and team recruitment/retention. These now cascade down so that each individual knows how they contribute. "Before EPM, many people, simply didn't have a clue how what they did was important to the overall mission of the firm. People get it now," says Mort O'Sullivan, CEO.
And all these benefits have also come with significant time and cost savings. O'Sullivan explains, "We are accountants and we are the best time-keepers on earth, so we always tracked the time we spent on performance appraisals. In the first year of the Halogen implementation, we saved 386 hours of people's time. Take that 386 hours and multiply it by our average billing rate and the saving is phenomenal."
The overall benefit to the organization has been improved employee performance management throughout the firm. Implementation of Halogen eAppraisal has turned a grueling annual task into something that offers true value for the team.
